


Ondine

by skinonbones



Series: Dreaming Escape [1]
Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Eve Polastri's "Tiresome Thinkbucket" Mind, F/F, POV Third Person, Red String of Fate, Running Away, Soft-ish Villanelle, end of game, very little plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:46:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24279067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skinonbones/pseuds/skinonbones
Summary: In the end, there was no easy direction of escape.Eve’s own disappearance was easier to fake: Carolyn drew up paperwork, so that she was, effectively, a political prisoner held by the British government. After a year or so, she would “die” in captivity. It was sound, as long as the paper trail was tight enough, the evidence overwhelming, the story airtight. Too many “ifs,” Eve thought. Hypotheses that could only be tested by the appearance of a new threat, which one or both of them might not survive. And how would this benefit Carolyn? Before she sat down, she picked a lemon from a tree and took the most enormous bite out of it, Eve heard. Rind and all. Eve heard: There are simply too many players in the game. When the threads become hard to count, the echo continued, then the knot becomes impossibly tangled.-Eve and Oksana find a way out. Canon-ish up to 3x06—alternate ending. Justice for Eve Polastri! There should be more of her in Season 3. (There is sex, with plot.)
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Series: Dreaming Escape [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1754155
Comments: 25
Kudos: 164





	Ondine

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Lower Dens’s “Ondine.”
> 
> ONDINE. I shall certainly make a fine wife. You think you’re a wife because you know how to cook a ham? That’s not being a wife.  
> HANS. No? What else is it?  
> ONDINE. It’s to be everything your husband is and everything he loves. It’s to be the humblest part of him and the noblest. I shall be the shoes of your feet, my husband. I shall be the breath of your lungs. I shall be the hilt of your sword and the pommel of your saddle. I shall be your tears, your laughter and your dreams. What you are eating there, it’s I.  
> HANS. It’s seasoned to perfection.  
> ONDINE. Eat me, Hans. Eat me all.  
> (Jean Giraudoux, Ondine. Adapted by Maurice Valency)
> 
> "Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at the opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both."  
> (Djuna Barnes, Nightwood)

_ One does not live without pain _

_ Now one dies any old how _

_ One does not die of fear _

_ Mountains crumble in Olympus _

_ A thirsty dream suffices _

_ To die without you _

_ You are not gods _

_ You are not here _

_ You are not _

—Valentina Saraçini, “ [ Epitaph for You ](https://iwp.uiowa.edu/91st/vol5-num2/valentina-saracini) ” (from  _ Dreaming Escape _ )

*

In the end, there was no easy direction of escape. 

North, south, east, west—Eve thought of Alaska, the aurora borealis, fantasies of snow and darkness, and then of Cuba, where Assata Shakur had, after all, escaped not one but  _ several  _ extradition attempts by the U.S. State Department. The Caribbean heat, equatorial noon. She imagined saying to Oksana,  _ Did you know that there's no twilight at the equator? The sun just slips below the horizon _ — _ straight from day to night.  _ No gray zones; no hazy liminal periods, indecision between states. But Eve sat still in the train car; fingers carding through the hair of the quiet girl whose cheek rested against her shoulder. Slow, sweet breaths. While Eve’s mind whirled in a thousand directions at once, latching onto meteorological conditions as if on the hunt for a good metaphor—it was an easy analogy: her own wild punches at the rain, grasping for control in conditions where control was not only a straightforward non-option, but a cruel fantasy—Villanelle—Oksana—whatever her name was, now—as soon as the train began to move, had loosened each of her limbs—lax, golden—one by one, feline, and curled into the shape of Eve’s body as much as the rigid seats would allow. Closed her eyes. Every once in a while, her eyelids would flicker with the motion of the eyes beneath (translucent, finely-veined, Eve looked with a strange feeling in her throat. The feeling that it was wrong to look at something that  _ could  _ look back and chose not to; the knowledge—so strange and delicate to get so near to it—that this was the closest she had ever been to Oksana unguarded), but Eve couldn’t tell whether she was awake or asleep. She looked vulnerable, and Eve tensed in response—tensed further, guiltily, when she realized:  _ If Oksana lets her guard down, mine has to stay up.  _ Then,  _ Am I able to fight for both of us?  _ She wondered what would happen if she were to seize Oksana by the throat, squeeze tight, right there and then—if the looseness of her muscles would dissolve before she could even blink, if Oksana would blaze back to life, larger, even, back to the character she had played seemingly centuries ago, in the kitchen of the house she had shared with Niko. She squeezed down the tightness in her stomach when she realized, she would never.  _ You can’t,  _ she heard; a whisper in her mind. An echo, but where was the source now?  _ I can _ —she thought in response— _ but that’s not the game, here, is it?  _ Another echo:  _ I’m like you now. I’m not afraid of anything.  _ Another memory Eve wanted to still  _ apply  _ in this new, alien context; but it wouldn’t take root. It wasn’t clear to her whether it was because they were long past the point where these words mattered, had reference, or if it was simply that even when it had seemed like they did, she had been mistaken—that they had always been in the situation they were currently in, but with blinders on, the terrain had looked smaller, brighter, in higher definition. A tangle smaller than the knot it was nested within.

“Eve,” Oksana murmured. She didn’t open her eyes.

Eve’s hand stilled.

“Yes?” she said, tentatively.

Oksana said nothing for a while, seemingly content with the hum of her body filling the silence between them—breath, pulse, the vital thrum of the body’s automatic technology that kept them both alive.

“I think,” she said, finally, voice still soft, consonants muffled in the soft tissue of her inner cheek, pressed against the crook of Eve’s neck, “maybe we do not worry about things we cannot  _ do  _ anything about.”

Eve laughed at that—a hoarse bark. She pressed her palm against Oksana’s cheek to feel the hollow, there, as Oksana pursed her lips.

“Sleep well?”

“I did not sleep,” Oksana muttered. Soft, like a cat who twitches its tail in annoyance, asking to be pet. “Your thoughts are too loud.”

“Well, I can’t think any quieter than I already was, can I?” Eve pointed out. “Anyway, thoughts don’t  _ sound  _ like anything.”

“Oh, but yours do,” Oksana said. “They sound like this.” And she reached up, lazily, to cup her palm around Eve’s ear, pushing the thicket of hair aside. And Eve heard the hollow rush of her own pulse—wild, quick, _loud._ Or was it Oksana’s. A high, tinny ringing behind it, and something lower.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. But it would sound like that no matter what.” I would have to be dead for it not to, she thought.

Oksana hummed in agreement. Then, she said, “When I was in training, they put me in a soundless room. A room designed to absorb sound. What is it called—”

“Sensory deprivation?”

“No, it’s something else—” Something more precise, Eve supplanted. Like her. Oksana— _Villanelle_ —may not have been subtle, but she was nothing if not precise, brilliantly, even in the luscious whirl of improvisation.

“An anechoic chamber,” Eve suddenly remembered. She remembered reading about it, during her own “training.” It was an experimental form of torture. She remembered imagining it, complete silence, wondering what it would be like to  _ feel  _ it.

“Yes, that is it.” Oksana smiled, then pursed her lips again. “I was in there for days, maybe. Maybe less. It was hard to tell. But when you go in, it is not silent. You hear two sounds: one high—it rattles in your skull, makes it impossible to sleep—and one low. They told me, later, that the high sound is the sound of your nervous system”—she tapped her own temple, as if to locate the nerves—“and the low sound is your blood”—and then she placed thumb and index on either side of her throat, against the pulse points. Eve looked at the indents. “Until you die there will be sounds.” She quieted for a moment. “They thought it was  _ so  _ clever, that it is quite painful to have to listen to only the sound of your own body, staying alive.” Eve could practically hear her eyes rolling.

_Pain does not have to be clever_ —she imagined Oksana's thoughts, imposed form onto them. When it seemed more often than not that while her own thoughts ran in circuits, coded sentences with a syntax and semantics, punctuated by impulses, Oksana thoughts ran like water; they ran where they were given opportunity, ran unarticulated until given opportunity, forceful, opportunistic, _alive. Pain does not have to be clever—pain is just pain._ It would match the profile, Eve thought, if Oksana believed that cleverness belonged to the artist, not to the nature of pain itself. But why should she try to squeeze Oksana's mind into the mold of her own. Why bother, when their understanding of each other had nothing to do with this fraught rationality—this sensibility she had watched Niko wield as if plugging a leak in a dam with a single finger. Eve had begun to think more economically, in terms of necessity. _I'm like you now._ Oksana's voice in her mind, a thin coating over her own— _When you understand luxury as luxury,_ it said, _Indulgence as indulgence,_ _it feels so much better, doesn't it? You can really_ enjoy _it—you can learn to let yourself go._ That was how opportunity came to feel so thrilling. Eve knew it was an incomplete picture. Her mind had created a profile of Villanelle; a character built from data, like a composite sketch made by a forensic sketch artist. Whatever Oksana felt as need—who said it was built on the grounds of pure survival? Who could say why it was that she came back for Eve, over and over: neither luxury nor life-support.

They listened to the train hurtling against the air. Eve’s heart clenched, even as the breakneck speed of her own pulse slowed, settled. The pulse points. The image of Villanelle’s fingers, touching her own tender points—the thick tines of a pitchfork piercing through Niko’s neck. Eve was astonished that Niko had survived—realized, afterwards, with a sense of bathos, that this seemed to prove that survival, perhaps, was not so much a  _ skill  _ as a roll of the dice. Any idiot could do it.  _ Any  _ kind, bumbling  _ idiot who you loved for decades,  _ she corrected herself—a hot flare of guilt, again, before it dissolved— _ any idiot could do it. _

“Have you heard of Ondine’s Curse?” she asked, trying to keep her tone casual, conversational.

“Hm, no.”

“It’s a medical condition,” Eve said. “Where your body forgets to automatically breathe. You have to think about it, remind yourself to do it. And if you don’t, you just stop breathing and die.” We take our functioning for granted until we can’t. It often came with trauma to the brainstem.

“Eve, my knowledge of human anatomy,” her tongue rolled the words around, awkwardly, “is  _ mostly  _ about what  _ I _ can do to  _ kill  _ people, not what other people’s own bodies do to kill themselves. What am I supposed to do?  _ Talk to  _ someone and convince them to just forget to breathe?” 

Eve laughed at that, deep in her belly; felt Oksana smile with satisfaction.

“I’ll try that,” Eve said. “And if it doesn’t work out, you can take care of the rest.”

Oksana went still at that, and Eve felt her guard slipping up, between their two skins.

“Or I will,” she added, appeasing. “I can.”

“You can be both the woman and the snake,” Oksana said, quietly. A little begrudgingly. “You could convince anyone to do anything."

In the end, they had decided on a train to Copenhagen, then Carolyn’s—or Konstantin’s?—final kindness: a car left on the outskirts of the city, new passports, new bank accounts painstakingly forged under new identities, by a new hacker Carolyn had finally hired once Kenny’s absence had grown out of its immediate shock and materialized its own body, began to take up space and a life of its own. New weapons. And a safehouse in the Arctic Circle, a tiny island off the northern coast of Norway, a town famous for having abolished time. It was Alaska, and not. It was the best Carolyn could do, while she waited out the next deaths, the ones to come. While she watched Paul from her new-old office, still as a chess queen next to her king, strategically watching as her own pawns and livery were swept off the board—Eve heard, in Carolyn’s crisp voice,  _ The game, Eve, is to prevent a checkmate. You misunderstand the pork and beans, so to speak, of chess if you place your wager entirely on the offensive front.  _ The metaphor was wrong, Eve thought. The king was null—in standard chess, there are already uncountable ways of reaching checkmate. A larger infinity when “checkmate” didn’t rest on a single chokepoint—the cornering of one vulnerability that could win the whole game. Carolyn had allowed the two of them an out—Eve wondered if this was her stashing two pieces in her sleeve, a reserve army off the board. Or if Carolyn had, this whole time, been playing an entirely different game—three-dimensions instead of a flat plane—and their “escape” was simply Carolyn placing the two of them in another position, rather than out of the fray. What did it matter? A new echo, fresher than the rest:  _ we do not worry about things we cannot  _ do  _ anything about.  _ Null result. Reset.

"What do you want to do?" Oksana asked. Her voice light, high, as in the Roman ruins, but a little frayed now, worn down. "When we get there."

"Have dinner," Eve said. Oksana hummed in agreement. "Then a bath." Then check all the locks, she added, silently. "Then sleep."

"Sleep now," Oksana said. "I will keep watch."

So they shuffled their bodies around, a little awkwardly—not quite comfortable, yet, with their bodies, together, in such proximity—put the armrest up, between their seats. Eve curled into a tight ball, feet braced against the wall of the train, head on the makeshift sweater-pillow in Oksana's lap, and closed her eyes. And lay there, quietly, until the slow motion of Oksana's stomach, the ebb and flow of her breath, lulled her to sleep.

In her dreams, words flickered behind her eyes: _A desire containing the price of satisfaction._

*

They stopped in Copenhagen for sandwiches. _Smørrebrød,_ Oksana said. She wrinkled her nose, and said, _Danish is the worst. It is like speaking with your mouth full of gum. The Swedish say it is ‘a mouthful of potatoes’_ — _but it is gum._ A satisfied smile. She also said, _Someday we will eat better food in Copenhagen. You know the most famous restaurant in the world is right here._

_ I know,  _ Eve said. Thinking back to evenings on the couch with Niko, endless hours with food documentaries. Felt nothing, not even nostalgia or relief.  _ Someday. _

Oksana ate in large bites, sucked a drop of soft yolk off a finger. Looked up at Eve’s face, and said,  _ Eat. Please.  _ Smoked salmon and dill on thick, Danish rye. They had paid in cash, walked their sandwiches to the benches in front of the lakes separating Nørrebro and København K. A central location, easy look-out; “safe.” To anyone, they would look like a couple having a late lunch, just like anyone else. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Eve imagined the two of them: a middle-aged Asian woman with an American mouth, a young, twenty-something blonde who looked like nothing Eve had ever seen before, and—at second glance—like everything. She was the focal point of every background. Part of it, blended with it; but she made it all context. The two of them made no sense together in any story but their own.

_ Eve, I will eat it for you if you do not eat it yourself,  _ Oksana warned, teasingly. The light from the lake glinted off the surface, rebounded against her eyes. How could she be so golden?

_ What are we?  _ Eve said, dazed. She meant to say:  _ What are we doing? _

_ We are here,  _ Oksana said.  _ Together.  _ And she lifted the sandwich up to Eve’s lips, eyebrow quirked—a suggestion, if not a demand. Eve shrugged it away—then reconsidered, took a bite. Oksana’s eyes said:  _ And that is everything.  _

She had not slept easily on the train. Oksana had not slept at all, and it was beginning to show; the damp gleam of her eye, weariness settling in around her mouth.

_ I’ll drive,  _ Eve said, as if to reassure her.  _ We’ll make a stop at night, and sleep.  _ A town just outside Oslo. Drammen. Lillehammer, if they could make it.

Oksana nodded; it might as well have been a shrug.  _ Okay,  _ she said.

_ ‘Okay?’  _ Eve replied. She felt the familiar tightening in her chest: panic.  _ Oksana, what if we don’t make it? _

And Oksana’s eyes were hooded, cautious.  _ Yes, okay.  _ Another bite.  _ I just want to enjoy our time together,  _ she said.

Then it hit Eve—perhaps Oksana did not expect them to survive. And if she didn’t, what was Eve supposed to do?

_ I am trying to keep us  _ alive _ ,  _ she said.  _ Do you even care?  _

Oksana's face was unreadable.  _ I do not care to struggle with love, Eve, _ she said.  _ It simply exists. It should. I do not care, no, to keep us alive if it is at the expense of  _ enjoying  _ that we are. _

And there was that grip on her heart, again—but a different one.

_ Who said anything about love,  _ she said. 

Oksana looked straight into her eyes. Direct, completely focused. A locked door with a key that Eve knew she believed Eve possessed. And maybe it was true.  _ You did.  _

Of course.

They finished their food silently. Swan boats bobbing in the waters of the lake, young couples walking by, dreamy light of summer; the sun wouldn’t set until 23:00.

*

They made it to Lillehammer.

After their sandwiches, the two of them walked—narrow alleyways, minor streets, across the lakes, across a little strait, along Amager Boulevard to a gray Volvo parked in an alley next to a cemetery. All in silence, except for Oksana’s hand, light on Eve’s wrist, index finger stroking lightly at the tender underbelly, the veins and tendons there. And then they were in the car; passports, bank cards, phones, guns, a wig for “Villanelle”—and a box of chocolates, with a note from Carolyn:  _ I suppose congratulations are in order.  _ And Eve drove. Across the border, to Sweden, up the western coast, and then into Norway. 

The passage was so smooth it set Eve’s teeth on edge; in her imagination, she realized somewhere near Gothenburg, surprised that she had even imagined this—she had always pictured that there would be a chase. That “Villanelle” would hide in the boot of the car while she crossed borders, holding her breath as border security scrutinized her and her passport, that they would be on the run,  _ someone  _ would be looking for them with the scent of blood in the air. Probably from a fresh kill by Villanelle. This, instead, was eerily banal—because no one  _ was  _ looking for them, she realized. She had killed Dasha and stolen her phone. She had been typing reports to Helene, Oksana peering over her shoulder, correcting her impression of Dasha’s voice—until Konstantin’s “death” (was it “death” in scare-quotes? Eve wondered. Was it real?) caused enough of an uproar for them to slip away. It was a matter of time before The Twelve realized that they had lost track of Villanelle—if only for a few days—but these were those few days. And Eve had to trust that Carolyn was on the other end, fabricating Oksana’s own murder. Perhaps the story would be that Dasha did it, desperate to lose her final charge, go home, that Dasha was sloppy in spinning Oksana’s murder into a story about terminating a failed asset, and that Dasha was smart enough to take matters into her own hands, then, and kill herself. Leaving Villanelle free, as long as she stayed out of sight. Eve’s own disappearance was easier to fake: Carolyn drew up paperwork, so that she was, effectively, a political prisoner held by the British government for minor treason. After a year or so, she would “die” in captivity. It was sound, as long as the paper trail was tight enough, the evidence overwhelming, the story airtight. Too many “ifs,” Eve thought. Hypotheses that could only be tested by the appearance of a new threat, which one or both of them might not survive. And how would this benefit Carolyn?  _ Before she sat down, she picked a lemon from a tree and took the most enormous bite out of it,  _ Eve heard.  _ Rind and all.  _ Eve heard:  _ There are simply too many players in the game. When the threads become hard to count,  _ the echo continued,  _ then the knot becomes impossibly tangled. _

To Eve’s surprise, Oksana popped one chocolate in her mouth—and another—and then no more, after casting a glance at Eve’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel.

_ I am going to sleep now,  _ she said, softly.  _ Good night, Eve.  _ And she waited, expectantly. For what, Eve wasn’t sure.

_ Good night,  _ she said. Surprised by the tenderness in her own voice, and the hoarse croak of it. Everything was catching her by surprise, lately. Too much.  _ Sleep well.  _

And then Oksana took her hand, pried it gently from its vice-like grip, held it in both of hers, on her lap. And fell asleep, cheek pressed against the luxe neck-pillow Carolyn had also helpfully supplied, head tilted towards Eve.

_ Love simply exists,  _ Eve heard. And it was true. There was another creature in the car with them, between them; it shared their skin, made it one. It simply exists. Her heart ached for the feral creature of Villanelle—she didn’t know this soft thing in the seat next to her. She no longer felt poisoned by fascination, a violent longing she fantasized would only be satisfied by ripping, settling right into the guts of Villanelle, red and still warm. Her axis was tilting. Something else was true north.

The drive took 10 hours. Oksana slept in fits, and even awake, watched Eve, with tender, cautious eyes. She said little. They listened to the radio, stopped for a bathroom break only once, at a gas station at the very north-west tip of Sweden. When the final border was crossed, into Norway, the tension suddenly dissolved—only then did Eve recognize it as tension. 

She pulled her hand from Oksana’s sleeping grip, stroked her fingertips through the hair by Oksana’s temple. Glanced—and froze, looking directly into Oksana’s open eyes. They looked at each other wordlessly, letting the volume of their gaze swell, fill the car. The air was heavy, charged. The darkness of the road whipped by—cold, fresh, the scent of pine, past midnight. Eve brought her fingers back to her temple, and this time, stroked down her face. The full curve of bone, soft give of cheek. Let her thumb rest against Oksana’s full lower lip. Oksana parted her mouth, just slightly, eyes unreadable; a warm breath ghosted against the pad of Eve’s finger. Eve imagined that she could see it, like a mist in the darkness of the car. Felt it, coiling in her stomach. Remembered a bathroom. The veil of the mirror.

_ Good morning,  _ Oksana said then, her eyes honey-green in the dark. A new color, Eve thought, just for her.  _ Are we there yet? _

_ Almost,  _ she said.  _ Almost. _

And in another half-hour, they were.

*

They settled in a grimy motel. Paid in cash.

“I’m sure it’s not up to your standards,” Eve said. The joke snagged somewhere in her mouth, on her teeth, and fell flat in the air. Oksana gave her a look, and shrugged it off.

“Are you hungry, Eve?” she asked. “I think there is some food in the car.”

Eve shook her head. Wordlessly, in the lobby, standing side by side, they had picked a room with a single bed. They stood there, now. Neither of them had reached for the light. Eve took in the banal details: faded wallpaper. Clean brass bedside lamps on either side of the bed.  _ Not like we’ll be doing much reading,  _ she thought to herself. A bathroom that also looked sparse; from the open door, a toilet, sink, cramped Nordic shower. But the sheets smelled clean, freshly laundered. Already, close to 2 a.m., the sky was beginning to lighten; sun below the horizon, but the vault of the stars turning a deep indigo. Their luggage was minimal—a single bag each, light enough to carry by hand.

“What are we going to do?” Eve asked. Her voice was shaky. “With all this time, if we get it?”

Oksana blinked. She ran a hand through her hair, popped her hip.

“ _ I  _ don’t know,” she said. “What do you think, Eve? What do you want?”

Despite napping in the car, she looked tired. Her eyes flashed.

Eve let out an even shakier laugh. She flung her hands up—the universal “fuck if I know.” 

“You, I guess,” she said. Her hands shook with it. She felt drunk with exhaustion. “You.”

Oksana sat on the bed. She began to pull off her boots. Through their whole trip, her clothes were off-kilter, for her—flung together, less than artistic. They had fled from London together, barely a conversation to be had beforehand, the words  _ I don’t want to do this anymore  _ hanging between them, like a string binding them together. A stitch. A promise on Eve’s end, still unspoken. It hung between them, a bond neither of them mentioned but both knew was there. Oksana pulled off her trousers, leaving her legs bare. Surprisingly practical, unglamorous underwear— _ you can’t fight in lace panties, I guess,  _ lurked in the back of Eve’s mind. She pulled off her socks. Then her shirt—a simple t-shirt, gray, a kind of clothing Eve hadn’t seen Oksana wear since the night she’d hunted Frank. And there she sat, legs folded criss-cross on the ed, hands in her lap, wearing only—inexplicably—a silk slip and mismatched panties. The hem of it had peeped out from below her t-shirt all along, Eve realized. A detail that had gone unfiled. As if Oksana had planned to wear a dress, and changed her mind mid-way, settling on something comfortable and practical instead. In a rush. A thin golden chain around her neck, dipping under the neckline. Her hair hung loose—soft gold, honey—brushed against the tops of her shoulders and curled in wisps around her ears. Eve’s mouth felt dry. Nothing about Oksana—not even the way she had undressed (practical, efficient)—felt suggestive in the moment. Her eyes said,  _ After everything between us _ — _ Eve, you have to come to me. _

“You should not want what you already have,” Oksana said. Her voice was low, quiet. “It is a waste.” 

Eve laughed again. 

“I already have you?” she said, feeling dumb. Only echoing the words Oksana had said. Feeling them reanimate, alive, in her mouth. “How do I know?”

“Didn’t I tell you, already?” Oksana said. Her voice throbbed with longing. “Haven’t I told you so many times?”  _ What is stopping you?  _

Another echo:  _ You are mine.  _ It wasn’t a failure of “I—you” slipping into “I—it,” Eve suddenly realized. Oksana played characters—she knew, as something so fundamental it never rose to the level of conscious thought, that roles were more fluid than they seemed, names slippery things that, like skin, covered the raw material underneath. The material was the creature in the car. The thing whose skin stretched across their two bodies. Two fates.

“What if it’s too late?” The question slipped out, meaningless. Oksana’s eyes—pupils blown into two black holes—seemed to swallow it, reduce it to nothing.

“ 'Taste and see,' ” she said. Her voice barely a breath, the barest hint of a question curling around the edges.

“A psalm?”

“Yes, we had to learn them in school—but Eve—” 

And her feet were carrying her across the room, to Oksana, the sliver of dim, pale light against her golden shoulder, the shaft of bone between its round of flesh and the long column of her neck, pressed her mouth there, sucked, as one does with summer fruit—a bite, before tongue and cheek move to catch the juice. Oksana’s breath caught in her throat; Eve pressed her mouth there, as well. She wanted to swallow her breath, be  _ there,  _ in her lungs.

Then there were Oksana’s hands, in her hair, nails feathering down the nape of her neck, before the low sound of Oksana’s need, her body suddenly flaring to life with Eve’s mouth on her nipple, wet and hot through the thin silk of her slip. Her hands impatiently pushing up the hem of Eve’s shirt, past her stomach, up to her chest—Eve raised her arms to slip them through the sleeves, yanked it the rest of the way off and onto the floor. And there Oksana was—hands tracing her ribs, on her breasts, pulling Eve closer, closer, onto the bed, Oksana flat on her back, Eve’s knees planted on either side of her hips, Oksana’s hands on her thighs.

“You—” Eve gasped.

“Yes,” Oksana whispered, pulling Eve down to nip and suck at her throat. “Yes.”

It was clumsy, at first, until Eve was on her back, thighs shaking around Oksana’s hand, gasping and crying out her orgasm while Oksana’s mouth sucked at her nipple, pressed hot kisses down her flank; Oksana sucking marks along her inner thighs, while Eve trembled from the aftershocks, her mind finally, finally going still, catching up to the moment.

Then, Oksana—hair wafting in sheets around her face, gasping on her forearms and knees, hands grasping at the sheets while Eve held the ridge of her hips from behind, stroked down her thighs and up her soft belly, tongue buried in the folds of her cunt.    
  


“Please,” she whispered, “please, Eve—”

Eve rolled onto her back, pulled Oksana’s thighs around her face. And sucked softly on her clit, as Oksana gasped, moaned, bucked her hips against her mouth; slid two fingers into her cunt, moaned at its heat, curled and stroked until Oksana cried out and  _ clenched  _ around her, riding her fingers until her body shook, overwhelmed.

And again, and again; and it was different every time.

  
  
  


*

  
  
  


“I do not want to be…” Oksana trailed off, looked at the ceiling, where the barest shadows of leaves from the window across the room flickered, like ghosts. “Morbid. Anymore, I think.” It is enough that death exists; what use is it to feed it in the mind as well? she thought.

“Morbid.” Eve tested the word out in her mouth; sometimes when they said the same words, turned around in their very different mouths, all the different muscles they were accustomed to, it sounded almost as if they weren’t saying the same thing at all.  _ We are the same,  _ Eve heard, an echo of a memory. “What do you mean by that, exactly?  _ Enjoying  _ death? Thinking about it? Living through it?” 

Terminal, Oksana thought. Inevitable. Trapped by a contract, by a master you can neither see nor escape. But they were inevitable, also—there were different ways, she decided, to face an end.

“How do you imagine I would die?” she asked. Eve pulled closer, drawn in—Oksana felt a pang, for Villanelle, for the way she would have used this voice, this vulnerability, when now it felt like something raw and pulsing, pulled from her. The child from Grismet she still could barely bring herself to notice, revulsion and tenderness and grief all in one skin. She tried to lighten her tone; add froth and light, irony and indulgence, champagne tickling the tip of a nose. “A clean kill—something nice.” Eve said nothing. “Please,” she whispered.

“I would swallow you whole,” Eve said. Her irises were thinner than the moon; an amber sliver, black, black pupils gulping in the darkness of the room. For a second Oksana imagined that not even a shadow could be cast; they would be sucked into the darkness of Eve’s eyes before they had a chance. She turned onto her back, skin velvety and lunar in the shadows, barest gleam of sweat. And lifted her fingers to her mouth, sucked Oksana’s sweat off of the tips. Her voice was like something suddenly unearthed; husky, deep. Oksana felt it low in her belly, felt it in her bones, felt it in the low throb of her cunt. “I would devour you. I want to, even now.” 

Oksana groped blindly in the bed for Eve’s hand—found it, traced the hard lines of nail, bone, joints, up to her wrist, lifted it to her own sternum, Eve’s palm—all the lines, Oksana thought vaguely, her whole fate—resting between her breasts, just shy of her heart, fingertips grazing the dip between her clavicles. Eve made a soft sound. Her fingers flexed on Oksana’s skin, pressed lightly against the warmth of her chest. Oksana echoed it; felt it in the soft tissue of her mouth—hers now.

  
“Eve,” she said. Thinking, _First, one understands hunger._ Thinking, _A desire containing the price of satisfaction._ “I am already there—here. In you. Where else would I be?” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Let me know what to think, & if you want to chat, find me on Twitter @choking0hazard.


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